Category: General

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Feminist Valentine

Calvin B., Hope Dector and I made a Valentine for you all.
Download to share as PDF | as JPG | as individual JPG images
image of romance book cover with text reading 'The Romance Myth'
Image of Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuire - you complete me with text reading 'Romantic love is the most important relationship people can have, It's worth dying for, It completes you, Romantic love is EXCLUSIVE, If it's real, you won't find anyone else attractive or get crushes on anyone else.
Image from Twilight with text reading 'Obsession, jealousy and possession are natural and okay - it means he likes you, If it's real, it will last forever and should lead to marriage and happily ever after'
Image of Catch Him and Keep Him book cover with text reading 'Compete with others to gain romantic attention from desirable partners, Women must be sexually willing and adventurous to keep men, but if a woman enjoys sex or pursues it she's a slut, Women should give up everything for their kids and husbands or they are selfish'
Image of The Little Mermaid with text reading 'To get romance, women must be skinny, sexy, and able to perform every cultural fantasy about femininity and submission, yet also independent and confident'
Image of cis heterosexual couple in sunset with text reading 'What the romance myth feeds - dependency and resentment, cheating, and domestic violence, 30 percent of relationships, queer and straight alike, include domestic violence'
Image of Cosmo cover with text reading 'Research shows that 80 percent of women are unhappy with what they see when they look in the mirror, That makes sense because the current media ideal for women's bodies is achievable by less than 5 percent of women in terms of weight and size, Top models weigh 23 percent less than the average woman, Eating disorders are the third most common chronic illness among women, 81 percent of 10-yr-old girls in the US have dieted at least once, The single largest group of high school students considering or attempting suicide are girls who feel they are overweight'
Image of Simpsons with Marge cleaning while Homer sleeps and Bart plays with text reading 'Economic vulnerability, especially for women, One partner is coerced into unpaid domestic labor, and often can't get out of the relationship because of loss of job experience and earning potential'
Image of Kim Kardashian and Chris Humphries at their wedding with text reading 'Who Benefits from the Romance Myth - 38 billion dollar hair industry, 33 billion dollar diet industry, 40 billion dollar wedding industry, 24 billion dollar skincare industry, 18 billion dollar makeup industry, 15 billion dollar perfume industry, 13 billion dollar cosmetic surgery industry'
Image of ad for The Bachelor with text reading 'Men, of course, these dynamics are also true in lesbian and gay relationships, and not all men are in relationships that match these standards, but for the most part, men still do less dishes, change fewer diapers, and have more orgasms, All the bosses and corporations who get the benefit of unpaid domestic labor that makes it possible for paid laborers to come to work because their food, emotional, childcare, sexual, and other needs are met at home'
Image of Toto revealing the wizard in the film The Wizard of Oz with text reading 'Dispel the Romance Myth'

  • Image Descriptions:
  • Slide 1: A torso of a shirtless man and a woman in a red silky neglige, he is grabbing her waist and she appears to be pulling up her skirt. The text says : Temptation too powerful to resist: The Romance Myth.
  • Slide 2: Image of Tom Cruise delivering the famous line from “Jerry Maguire”: “I love you. You…complete me.” Text below says: “Romantic love is EXCLUSIVE! If it’s real, you won’t find anyone else attractive or get crushes on anyone else.”
  • Slide 3: Image of Edward and Bella laying in the meadow staring at each other from Twilight movie. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for you…I’d rather die than be away from you.” Text says “Obsession, jealousy and possession are natural and ok. It mean’s he likes you. When its real it should last forever and lead to marriage and happily ever after.”Slide 4: Shows book cover of a book called “Catch Him and Keep Him: A Woman’s Guide to Finding Mr. Right… And Keeping Him for Good!” Text says: “Compete with others to gain romantic attention from desirable partners. Women must be willing and adventurous to keep men, but if a woman enjoys sex or pursues it she’s a slut. Women should give up everything for their kids and husbands or they are selfish.”
  • Slide 5: Still from the Little Mermaid movie of Ariel in the sea talking to her friends. Text says: “To get romance, women must be skinny, sexy and able to perform every cultural fantasy about femininity and submission, yet also independent and confident.”
  • Slide 6: Image of a couple in the ocean together with the setting sun behind them about to kiss that says “Stalking Love.” Text says: “What the Romance Myth Feeds: Dependence & Resentment & Cheating & Domestic Violence.. 30% of relationships, queer and straight alike, include domestic violence.”
  • Slide 7: Background is the cover of a women’s magazine that says in large letters “Flatten your belly.” Text says: “Research shows that 80% of women are unhappy with what they see when they look in the mirror. That makes sense because the current media ideal for women’s bodies is achievable by less than 5% of women in terms of weight and size.  Top models weigh 23% less than the average woman. Eating disorders are the third most common chronic illness among women. 81% of 10-yr-old girls in the US have dieted at least once. The single largest group of high school students considering or attempting suicide are girls who feel they are overweight.”  
  • Slide 8: Background is a scene from the Simpsons with Marge cleaning while Homer sleeps on the couch and Bart runs through the room after the dog. Text says: “Economic vulnerability (especially for women)–one partner coerced into unpaid domestic labor, often can’t get out of relationship because of loss of job experience and earning potential”
  • Slide 9: Image of a celebrity wedding with woman in traditional dress and veil and man in white tuxedo. Text says: “WHO BENEFITS? The $40 billion wedding industry.The $38 billion hair industry. The $33 billion diet industry. The $24 billion skincare industry. The $18 billion makeup industry. The $15 billion perfume industry.The $13 billion cosmetic surgery industry.”
  • Slide 10: Image from The Wizard of Oz with Dorothy finding the Wizard behind the current. Text says: Dispel the Romance Myth!
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Videos and interview

Here is a recent interview on Society and Space–thanks to Natalie Oswin for asking very interesting questions!

I have some new video projects to share.  Here are four short movies that Reina Gossett and I made with Hope Dector from the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Please join us for a live online discussion of them on February 7.

Reina Gossett + Dean Spade (Part 1): Prison Abolition + Prefiguring the World You Want to Live In.

Reina Gossett + Dean Spade (Part 2): Practicing Prison Abolition Everyday

Reina Gossett + Dean Spade (Part 3): What About the Dangerous People?

Reina Gossett + Dean Spade (Part 4): Gun Control + Producing Dangerousness

Also, I am excited about two new videos out from Washington Incarceration Stops Here!

Please share these videos!

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Reviews, news, interviews

Thanks to Dan Irving for a generous review of Normal Life in GLQ and to Rachel Levitt for this review of Normal Life in the inaugural issue of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking.  I also want to share a new interview that just came out at the Youngist. And finally, thanks to Jordan Flaherty for this excellent Al Jazeera America story about police profiling of trans people. I can’t figure out how to embed the video here so I’m sharing this image of a Trans Day of Action poster that I love instead.

 

 

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War and Marriage

This week a new article by me and Craig Willse went up on Organizing Upgrade that aims to capture some of the important left critiques of marriage that have been obscured by the pro-marriage messages of same-sex marriage advocacy.

Also, this interview about why the new campaign for military inclusion for trans people won’t benefit our movements went up on BuzzFeed.  As the President pushes us toward war in Syria, its especially important to build shared analysis about anti-war politics.  Military service inclusion campaigns invite us to be the new poster children of a purportedly fair and equal military, meanwhile the brutal violence of US militarism continues around the globe. I am hoping both these pieces will stimulate conversation and be useful among activists and in classrooms.

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New video and slideshow

Earlier this year I was invited to share a manifesto at the Tate Museum in London as part of the Gender Talents show. I couldn’t make it, so I made a video with Basil Shadid to capture some of the themes of Normal Life.  The Barnard Center for Research on Women just released the video on their website.

Impossibility Now from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.

The images in it go by quickly so I also made an annotated slideshow that you can watch at your own pace and learn what the images depict. You can also watch the video on youtube to see a version with captions (press CC).

While I was gathering images for the film I got completely stumped a couple times about how to illustrate certain ideas.  Two artists came to my rescue and created powerful images that I needed.

This one is from Mickey Dehn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This one is from Talcott Broadhead.

 

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Radio, Buzz and Stopping Jail from Being Built!

KPFA did some great programming around Pride this year focusing on critical queer and trans political resistance and critiques of same-sex marriage, gay military service and other hallmarks of wealthy white gay politics.  Here is a whole day of programs that aired on Pride Sunday. Here is a show focusing on the critique of same-sex marriage advocacy, including Kenyon Farrow, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and me. In other news, Buzzfeed published a list of 24 Americans Who Changed the Way We Think About Transgender Rights.  I’m excited to be on any list with Sylvia, Marsha, Miss Major, Lou and all these other amazing people.

Finally, I am so excited by all the inspiring work being done by Washington Incarceration Stops Here.  We are doing an awesome postcard campaign about what people think our county really needs rather than a new youth jail and family court buildings.  And we’re building a coalition of groups who have signed on to our Points of Unity.  If your organization wants to sign on, no matter where you are, please let us know! We’re also starting a zine so please let us know if you have art or writing you’d like to contribute or if you can help spread the word to people who may want to contribute, especially youth and people impacted by criminalization and child welfare systems.

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New Syllabus, Review, Blogpost and Translation

I’m co-teaching a class this semester with Prof. Katherine Franke about the law of occupation and colonialism.  The class looks at the occupation of Palestine, US colonialism in Guam, Puerto Rico, North America, Hawaii and the Marshall Islands, the US occupation of Iraq, and more.  You can see the syllabus here.

I also wanted to share a new review of Normal Life by Ro Velasquez Guzman in Shameless magazine, and a new blogpost I wrote for SRLP’s blog about how recent debates about gun control and mental health relate to trans politics and criminalization.  Finally, HUGE THANKS to Morgan Ztardust for translating “For Lovers and Fighters” in Spanish.  The translation is here.

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Blog Post for Upcoming Conference

This coming Friday and Saturday I’m heading to Los Angeles for a conference that marks the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and the 10th anniversary of Lawrence v. Texas.  In advance of the conference, speakers were asked to write blog posts related to the themes of the conference panels we are participating in.  These were posted to the Balkinization blog. I thought I’d re-post what I wrote here as well:

Sexual freedom, legal equality and settler colonialism

In recent weeks, the world has been captivated by the emergence of the Idle No More movement. Indigenous people and their allies in Canada and around the world have been engaging in a wave of protest actions.  These protests, which include marches, vigils, road blocks, railway blocks, flashmobs and the prominent hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat, are raising a number of significant issues.  Initially, the movement was a response to the Harper government’s introduction of Bill C-45, legislation that would significantly weaken environmental protection laws in Canada.  As the movement has grown, its message has broadened to raise questions about indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection more generally, both in Canada and around the world where indigenous people struggle against colonization and environmental degradation.
Movements against colonization raise significant questions for scholars studying the legal regulation of sexuality and family.  The imposition of gender norms and family formation norms and the use of sexual violence as a tool of war have been significant to processes of colonization.  The depiction of cultures and peoples targeted for colonization as “backward” in terms of sexuality and family formation has been a rationalization for colonization, and has often included portraying indigenous women as needing to be saved by the colonizers from their own families and cultures.  These methods and rationalizations are visible in the history of the colonization of North America where the Idle No More movement has been most visible so far, but we can also hear these rationales deployed to justify the war in Afghanistan, proposed war with Iran, and in rationales for Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine.
These dynamics are particularly interesting in the context of a contemporary gay and lesbian rights framework in the US and its global influence.  As many scholars have noted, the gay and lesbian rights framework has increasingly moved toward demands for formal legal equality in recent decades, particularly focusing on demands for military participation and access to legal marriage. There has been a great deal of critique of these demands by a range of feminist, anti-racist, queer and trans scholars.  One aspect of this critique that is particularly interesting in the context of the Idle No More movement’s growing momentum is how these demands speak or fail to speak to the quest for sexual freedom for those imagining freedom from an anti-colonial perspective.
Ostensibly, the contemporary gay and lesbian rights agenda developed from the sexual liberation movements of the 1960’s and ‘70’s that are remembered in images from the Stonewall Riots where queer and trans people fought back against police harassment and criminalization.  As it developed, its vision of “freedom” has become more aligned with joining the apparatuses of colonial occupation than fighting them. The US military literally operationalizes US colonial and imperial violence, and marriage enforces the family formation norms for the settler colonial state by disbursing essential benefits to the population based on whether we conform to that norm.  As the Idle No More movement and other anti-colonial movements such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement continue to grow, queer and trans politics faces interesting questions about how various approaches to conceptualizing sexual freedom relate to anti-colonial agendas that seek to dismantle the apparatuses in which certain lesbian and gay rights campaigns and court cases seek gay and lesbian inclusion. These questions are particularly interesting now, as gay and lesbian people are increasingly articulated as those that need saving in colonial discourses.  Access to legal marriage and military participation for gays and lesbians are now often used as measuring sticks for whether or not a country respects human rights, and human rights enforcement rationalizations are a popular justification for military intervention.  The Idle No More movement’s emergence in this moment provides an opportunity for reflection on the relationship between commitments to sexual freedom and commitments to self-determination and decolonization.
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Favorite books

Thanks to the owner of the most stylish collection of eyeglasses I have seen, Kate Clinton, for including Normal Life among her favorite books of the year in The Progressive’s “Favorite Books of 2012.” And thanks to the Modern Language Association/GLQ Caucus’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize Committee for honorable mention for Normal Life. Such a treat to be recognized alongside this year’s wonderful winners of that prize, Chandan Reddy’s Freedom with Violence and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism.